Online entrepreneur Nicole Dean teaches internet marketing tips and strategies. She also interviews other successful internet business owners to find out the secrets to their online success. Find out what they're doing that you're not.

1. Outright. They just changed their name to GoDaddy Online Bookkeeping so I guess I should start using that name. I have an aversion to doing books and for a really long time, I paid good money to have it done manually but Outright does all this automatically for me at a much lower price. The other neat thing, it tells me how much quarterly taxes to pay.

It does take a little bit of setup, but the setup is less if you did it at the beginning of your financial year or as close as possible, not at the end.

I started somewhere in March so it wasn’t too bad. For the first few months you have to tell it what to categorize but as the months go along it does a pretty good job of auto categorizing. I’ve tried many tools that claim to do this and they do, but this is by far the most accurate I’ve tried and I’m sticking to them.

You still have to go in every month to eyeball things and take care of a few transactions that it cannot understand. Some are recurring payments but it usually is just a handful. Much better than hundreds of lines every month. I also love that it emails me a weekly profit report.

Because I lack design skills but love great design, I go there weekly to seek awesome graphics for everything I need. Max does such a great job. There’s always new content, sometimes every week and it’s very affordable. The extended developer licensing is also pretty sweet.

You know, there’s not a lot that I pay monthly for, not even my shopping cart, which I paid a one time purchase or my autoresponder. However, there are a few monthly payments I cannot live without:

1) Dropbox. I store everything I have on it so it’s available no matter what device I am using.

2) Good outsourcing.

3) Good PLR. I’m lucky as I have found a couple of good PLR sources (Thanks, Nicole) that are so good I get a monthly subscription. Although I don’t use every single piece, I get an idea of what the hot trends are and to expand my own knowledge, if needed.

On another note, what I’d love to pay monthly for is a good coach/mentor. Haven’t found the right one yet who can take me on, but I know that person will come when the time is right.

Great & Smart Writers – We are constantly creating content so we need a really great writer for

1) Blog posts for new content on our blogs – We’ve gotten to the point where we ask our writers to research content that would be good for our blogs (on the topic of our niche, which is Book Publishing) – and they write the blog post for us too! We constantly need smart people who are capable of doing the research and the writing the makes sense for our business.

2) Book Publishing – Gone are the days where we write a single word in the books that we publish. When I first started (Deb) I would use a combination of PLR plus my own writing to publish books. YOu can’t use PLR anymore in Kindle Books, so everything has to be unique. We provide the writers with the article topics and they just write away…

3) Article Rewriters – Oftentimes we find great content, but we need to spin it to make it unique. No, we don’t use article spinners (huge waste of time) – we use a real person who knows what they are doing when it comes to rewriting things to make them unique and original

Another area where we spend money is:

Graphic Designer – I like to create banners because they are really simple. I also like to use web based photo editors for my facebook and google plus posts – but designing every cover and every graphic for a membership site just became too overwhelming. What happened was I was so busy pounding through my to do list that creating a cover great enough for kindle and other publishing platforms slowed me down because you really have to change gears to put on your creative cap – and that’s not always easy to do. I found someone who would create these quick graphics for us where creativity to them is like writing this blog post to me – EASY PEASY 🙂

Nicole Dean of .. here! .. says:

Wow. This took more effort than I thought to track all of these down. 🙂 Here’s my list. I will update if I missed anything.

Project Management.

If you work with service providers, this tool can be very helpful to manage your team.

Earn 1k a Day – I was paying for Dennis’ Earn 1k a Day forum, but upgraded to a lifetime membership after the first month. If I hadn’t, though, I would still gladly be paying.

How to Avoid Frustration.

As far as tips go for managing your subscriptions, these are mine.

1. I prefer to pay with paypal when given the option. It’s much easier to cancel if the person does not deliver or if I decide that I no longer need the service. If the service ONLY offers credit card payments and not paypal, I usually pass. It’s sometimes too hard to cancel otherwise.

2. I normally will try a subscription on a trial or monthly basis before I decide to upgrade to annual or lifetime options. That saves me from making a costly investment into something that I might not use.

3. If there is an affiliate program for a subscription that I LOVE LOVE LOVE and it’s recurring, I will share that program. It helps to reverse the cost. Of course, I test programs that are recurring before I’d ever recommend them. And, only a few make it past my “this totally rocks” filter. (You’ll see those above.)

4. I reassess my expenses on a regular basis. In fact, I found and cancelled two programs while writing this blog post. 🙂

If you’re not using a membership, figure out why.

Is it you? Is it them? Or is it just not the best fit?

If it’s you…

Set a calendar reminder to go get the content if it’s something downloadable. Go download it (or have a VA do it for you and put it into dropbox for you). Systematize your learning.

If it’s a program that you’re not using because you haven’t learned how to use it yet, then learn it. Schedule time to just dig in and learn how to use the darned thing.

If it’s them…

Is the material being presented in a way that you just won’t consume? Know yourself well enough to know what you will and will not actually use. If they only offer files in mp4s, but you want mp3s for listening to in your car, then ask them if they will offer it in both formats. If they say ‘no”, then cancel.

If it’s not a good fit…

Cancel. You can always go back later – although it may be a higher price, it’s better than wasting money on a program that you’re not using.

My homework for you.

Take inventory of your monthly and annual programs. Go through them and schedule time to USE those investments.

What about You?

What programs do you pay for on an monthly or annual basis that you love? Let me know!

Thanks for sharing this Nicole. I use Producteev in place of Basecamp. When I was researching for a similar software I came across Producteev – it is free and I simply manage my small team of 3 people using this tool.

Other than that I pay for Semrush (Pro recurring) and email autoresponder services (Aweber and Getresponse).

Just like you, I too look for a Paypal to have control over cancelling subscriptions. Thanks a bunch!

Hi there
I spent so much time on the internet, I bought everything in sight.. Mainly tools though as I was already making enough. I buy the tools that can help me do less and help me save money.

I have aweber, some awesome themes like Genesis (and 10 more), alexa stats (now that they are hidden).
I tried triber but thought it was too much work for me and confusing… I do use justretweet as it shows me good results.

I also simply use Elance to outsource and employed writers on a regular basis so they know what I need without too much work from me.

Another good one is Fiverr. I get awesome ebook covers there for $5 and the guy is a pro! Sometimes you waste your own time doing this kind of stuff when a pro can whip it up in minutes!

I do visit my paypal account every month or so to see if there are any monthly subs that I can get rid of. At one stage I was spending about $1000 on monthly bills which included approx $200 on hosting.

This is a great post with good resources and tips. I’ve paid for PLR memberships but now I buy PLR that is more targeted to my needs. I am spending money on outsourcing writing (articles, blog posts, press releases), press release submission, video creation & marketing, graphic design (ebook covers, header images, banners), web design troubleshooting and specialized tasks, programming problems, getting getting backlinks and virtual assistants. I buy how to information, WordPress templates & plug-ins, and some marketing software. They are not memberships but regular purchases.

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My mission: To help busy online marketers, specifically infoproduct sellers, to build sustainable online businesses that help them reach their financial and lifestyle goals while making both the web and the world a better place. And, hopefully having a lot of fun while doing it!